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“Confiscation could be an option”

This is one sure way to know you’re living in a post-constitutional police state: when some bloated legacy pol believes it within his power — or the government’s power generally — to seize private property protected under the Bill of Rights simply because he doesn’t care for its aesthetics. In fact, even by floating the idea of confiscation of firearms, what the left is admitting here is that to them the Constitution is a dead letter, and that they are more concerned with protecting government from it than they are in upholding the rights of the individuals it is there to insure.

Repeating a lie doesn’t make the lie any more true, so let me once again add some truth to the “conversation” on gun control: a semi-automatic rifle is no more an “assault weapon” than a semi-automatic pistol — both using the same one squeeze, one shot platform; and a semi-automatic pistol is no more an “assault weapon” than a revolver.

Moreover, the second amendment isn’t about hunting. The Framers deemed all of us part of a militia — either ready or reserve — so in truth, a better legal argument can be made that by virtue of your being a citizen you be compelled to keep a firearm, than that some Democratic political scion has within his power the ability to confiscate firearms from private citizens who have broken no laws.

This ain’t Australia, Governor Cuomo. And the fact that you believe you have such power to be used at your whim shows you aren’t fit to serve the public.

One final irony: how many police wielding semi-automatic “assault weapons” in .223 Remington — the same kind of gun used by the CT shooter — is it going to take to go door to door in attempt to confiscate the property of erstwhile law abiding citizens? And what kind of resistance from a literal police state campaign will they be met with?

You crazy gun nuts and your 2nd Amendment. We should just confiscate all the guns.

Many of you may truly believe that. You may think that the 2nd Amendment is archaic, outdated, and totally pointless. However, approximately half of the country disagrees with you, and of them, a pretty large portion is fully willing to shoot somebody in defense of it.

We’ve already seen that your partial bans are stupid and don’t do anything, so unless you are merely a hypocrite more interested in style rather than results, the only way to achieve your goal is to come and take the guns away. So let’s talk about confiscation.

They say that there are 80 million gun owners in America. I personally think that number is low for a few reasons. The majority of gun owners I know, when contacted for a phone survey and asked if they own guns, will become suspicious and simply lie. Those of us who don’t want to end like England or Australia will say that we lost all of our guns in a freak canoe accident.

Guns do not really wear out. I have perfectly functioning guns from WWI, and I’ve got friends who have still useable firearms from the 1800s. Plus we’ve been building more of them this entire time. There are more guns than there are people in America, and some of us have enough to arm our entire neighborhood.

But for the sake of math, let’s say that there are only 80 million gun owners, and let’s say that the government decides to round up all those pesky guns once and for all. Let’s be generous and say that 90% of the gun owners don’t really believe in the 2nd Amendment, and their guns are just for duck hunting. Which is what politicians keep telling us, but is actually rather hilarious when you think about how the most commonly sold guns in America are the same detachable magazine semiautomatic rifles I talked about earlier.

So ten percent refuse to turn their guns in. That is 8 million instantaneous felons. Let’s say that 90% of them are not wanting to comply out of sheer stubbornness. Let’s be super generous and say that 90% of them would still just roll over and turn their guns when pressed or legally threatened. That leaves 800,000 Americans who are not turning their guns in, no matter what. To put that in perspective there are only about 700,000 police officers in the whole country.

Let’s say that these hypothetical 10% of 10% are willing to actually fight to keep their guns. Even if my hypothetical estimate of 800,000 gun nuts willing to fight for their guns is correct, it is still 97% higher than the number of insurgents we faced at any one time in Iraq, a country about the size of Texas.

However, I do honestly believe that it would be much bigger than 10%. Once the confiscations turned violent, then it would push many otherwise peaceful people over the edge. I saw somebody on Twitter post about how the 2nd Amendment is stupid because my stupid assault rifles are useless against drones… That person has obviously never worked with the people who build the drones, fly the drones, and service the drones. I have. Where to you think the majority of the US military falls on the political spectrum exactly? There’s a reason Mitt Romney won the military vote by over 40 points, and it wasn’t because of his hair.

And as for those 700,000 cops, how many of them would side with the gun owners? All the gun nuts, that’s for sure. As much as some people like to complain about the gun culture, many of the people you hire to protect you, and darn near all of them who can shoot well, belong to that gun culture. And as I hear people complain about the gun industry, like it is some nebulous, faceless, all powerful corporate thing which hungers for war and anarchy, I just have to laugh, because the gun industry probably has the highest percentage of former cops and former military of any industry in the country. My being a civilian was odd in the circles I worked in. The men and women you pay to protect you have honor and integrity, and they will fight for what they believe in.

So the real question the anti-gun, ban and confiscate, crowd should be asking themselves is this, how many of your fellow Americans are you willing to have killed in order to bring about your utopian vision of the future?

I don’t even know what to say to someone showing this level of ignorance.

I wish women had to do as much paperwork to use their vaginas as I do to buy a gun… Just for a year or so. If there’s even the slightest chance that she might spawn one of the hooligans who runs shrieking through restaurants or screaming in the check-out line at the grocery store, permission denied!

Bill Ayres focuses his aim on teachers’ schools, indoctrinating the future indoctrinators. He’s not wrong in that, from his point of view. It’s the shortest way to getting what he wants. The trouble is, what he wants is madness. Yet, here we are, and madness reigns. Competence? Gone. Excellence? Disappeared. Wisdom? Ha, we’re kidding, right?

McGehee: I’d like to think so, anyway. My assessment was “mama’s boy with daddy issues”, which is kind of a sad thing when you’re, like, 65 years old. It’s unlikely that he’d be involved in any direct action. Anonymous bombings (where other people do the dangerous parts of actually making and planting them) is exactly his speed.

The only reason he’s not in jail is “white privilege” and having an extremely rich daddy who was extremely well-connected.

sdferr: “Bill Ayres focuses his aim on teachers’ schools”. Yes. Some of us have tried to change that, but it’s almost a lost cause at this point. Letting the existing system go smash and starting from scratch may be the only option.

“Letting the existing system go smash and starting from scratch may be the only option.”

Spies, I wonder. (Which is to say, in other words, I don’t know.) In the first instance, I often think there is very little any particular ‘letting’ is involved, insofar as neither I nor anyone I’ve seen has any specific idea what to ‘do’, in the sense of some particular act to be undertaken which would of itself make the difference to begin an alteration affecting future outcomes in a positive or ‘good’ sense. In this respect, the political ‘system’, if we can nominally designate such a thing, is akin to the ‘economic’ system, i.e., too vast to be understood in toto on its own terms: so I think I stand to it as though ‘it will where it listeth’. On the other hand, we’re always confronted with making local decisions, which either are or aren’t good in themselves, and we hope, lean toward the good, and hence lean toward a contribution to better outcomes. But as to the sort of certainty of the ‘let’, as though there is some ‘thing’ we might do to stop the crazy? I’m incapable of a pin-point.

I was speaking of the education system specifically. Fixing the existing system would require 50 years or more of hard and thankless work, and I don’t think we have that long.

Some local decisions that may help:

1) Homeschool your children (while you still can).
2) Discourage your children from attending university. The good parts of a university education can now be had elsewhere cheaply, or even free. If you or your child wants to study differential equations, Plato, or Victorian Romantic poets find others who want to do the same. If you need a teacher, hire one — then insist that the teacher stick to the subject instead of wandering off into Marxist claptråp.
3) If you are an employer, figure out ways to evaluate job candidates that don’t require a university diploma as a proxy. This is much today easier with so-called “knowledge workers” — you can have them show you a portfolio of their work on the web.

J. Howard, there’s been no ban but a lot of things have been done, specifically fuel and emissions regulatory “things” that have car manufacturers either dropping their muscle car lines or turning them into luxury lines. Most of the new cars on the street these days are mickey mouse cars, crossovers, and SUV’s(the rich) and a lot of the SUV’s are smaller that they used to be.

I apologize for over-generalizing Spies. It’s a bad habit of mine, I think. But now I wonder how you think the educational system goes down? Is this simply a matter of the over-extended money credit bubble, or involved some other way in the broader fiscal issues the nation faces? Or are you looking toward the underlying falsehoods of the pedagogy itself, and with somehow these sophistries coming to light, exposed as the scams they are, hence brought down apart from the financial questions? That is, even assuming a financial crash of some kind, would the sophistic pedagogy necessarily be dismantled in the aftermath, to be replaced by more rational aims and means?

With the fed govt $16T in debt and rapidly rising. With $55T in unfunded liabilities (it may have gone up to $70T), politicians like Cuomo are going to get a very nasty surprise. The legions won’t take Cuomo’s commands if Cuomo can’t pay them in real currency. He would be like the Late Roman Emperors in the West issuing out useless decrees with nobody to enforce them.

Besides, 3d printers are already printing out some gun parts. In 10-20 years, the issue will be moot.

The student loan situation is scary and it isn’t going to get better any time soon. This, I think, is going to lead to students and parents taking a hard look at just what they’re paying for, and perhaps seek alternatives.

Administrative bloat is another big issue (this is actually the largest factor in the outrageous cost of education at all levels — even in K-12, many districts have more non-teachers on the payroll than teachers). When cuts occur (and they are happening right now, despite all those votes for Obama), they tend to happen in teaching and research, never at the administrative level.

There are also demographic problems.

Note that I’m not one of those who thinks schools should be job training centers. In my opinion, becoming a responsible citizen requires knowledge of history, art, mathematics, and the rest, as well as your particular area of expertise.

Ha! Now that‘s kinda funny right there:
“While attacking National Rifle Association President Wayne La Pierre on NBC’s Meet the Press this weekend, host David Gregory actually violated gun laws in the city where he broadcasts. “

the cutting edge of education is specialization (i.e.”job training”). The idea that students must be well-rounded in order to begin their lives at 18 is swiftly taking a kick to the groin. Just read any of the education studies being done lately, as well as some of the secular homeschooling zealots.

the facts are: college is now out of reach for most. too expensive, the debt is suicide, there are no jobs. skills like machine repair and farming will be more valuable. Those that can provide for their own needs will be better off.

Our local district is opening up a new high school, sort of like a vocational center but a tad different in that it will also offer pre-med and pre-architecture programs etc.

I believe most parents have good intentions when it comes to making sure their children are learning, but I question whether many of them have the ability to homeschool. The spirit is certainly willing, but the knowledge base may be weak and the ability to transmit that knowledge in a way that is useful to the child that will allow him to make the eventual transition to high school. I am not certain about the parameters in all states, but I don’t know if a homeschooled child is considered to have the credentials to attend an accredited college or university. Additionally, if your child wishes to play sports, he is going to need to attend a high school.

Certainly that is not all homeschoolers, but a great many of the people around here homeschool their children not because the schools are bad (they aren’t) but because they have a personal beef with a teacher or teachers. They pull the kids out of school until they either get tired of having them at home or the kid whines about missing his friends one too many times. Then the kid has to reaclimate to school life until the parent(s) gets pissed off at the school/teacher/coach again and then it repeats. It makes it tough on everyone, especially the kid. Kids need routine and structure and many homeschoolers are unstructured and do things piecemeal.

The homeschoolers I have met who are seriously committed do a great job and their kids are outstanding students and fine, trustworthy young people anyone would be proud to know. It’s like anything else in life, you have to know your limitations. I didn’t homeschool my kids because I can’t teach them everything they need to know and a lot of that has nothing to do with classwork and everything to do with dealing with their fellow man. They need to know there are really nice people out there and that there are also a lot of jerks and some very dangerous types, as well. Also that assignments have a due date for a reason. You show up late, you get marked tardy. Too many tardies and your grade goes down. You can’t skip practice and still start in the football game, &c.

but I don’t know if a homeschooled child is considered to have the credentials to attend an accredited college or university.

short answer is yes. homeschoolers go to college if they want to, and colleges accept them easily because they are usually better students than the products of the public school system.

I don’t care whether ppl homeschool or not – to each his own. But the data and studies lately are turning homeschool into the thing to do, if you want to get your kid into the ivy leagues & if you can’t afford to live in a super rich school district.

(not that i give a rip about that, I’m letting my kids all make their own choices, this is just my observations over the last couple years both IRL and online)

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